...that the Gipper, speaking as a hired gun for the AMA at the time, was unsuccessful in getting the Medicare bill defeated.

But I found one thig that he said quite interesting. Ronnie asserted that if Medicare was passed--the equivalent of socialized medicine--that it would only be a short step until doctors couldn't control the patients they saw, the treatment they thought best, and how much they would be paid for their services. Medicine these days isn't "free market" at all. American healthcare, for better or worse, is dictated by profit-motivated insurance companies, certainly not the doctors or hospitals.

Medicare only applies to people over 65. Most other Americans, other than those that have no healthcare insurance, have private "free market" insurance. I wonder what those same doctors would say today about how they are able to practice their profession? Do they have complete authority to prescribe the treatment they deem best? Is their income fundamentally controlled by someone else? Is someone else "suggesting" that one form of treatment is better than another and that they must follow that recommendation if they are to be paid anything? We all know the answer. We get whatever care is authorized by some clerk looking at a computer screen at an insurance company.

C'mon folks, the free market has brought us pretty much over the brink of socialized medicine already. How many of you can only afford, or are only authorized to use an HMO, where you have to see whatever doctor is on duty? How many of you have to get a referral from a primary care doctor before you can see a specialist? Even then, does the specialist you select have to be on an "approved" or "in network" list? Someone tell me how this is a whole lot different from "socialized medicine".

I'm certainly not proposing that we have national health care. But there would be one big advantage to it that no one has mentioned so far. If the doctors were all employees of the federal government, we could stop flapping our gums about the need for tort reform, the extraordinary expense of malpractice insurance, and how much that has to do with escalating healthcare costs. The malpractice insurance companies and the PI lawyers might not like it, but the number of malpractice cases would drop like a rock--without any tort reform legislation! How many sleazy lawyers do you think would take on the U.S. government with spurious claims by people who may or may not have suffered pain and suffering? How many cases would be brought in federal courts, with their standards of evidence and procedure? And how often do you think the Justice Department would settle out of court, just to get the case off their "cases pending" list? Not many, methinks.

Just a thought.